THEON GREYJOY

[THEON GREYJOY]

THEON GREYJOY

GENERAL INFO

NAME: theon greyjoy
OTHER ALIASES: reek, theon turncloak, prince of fools
AGE: twenty-three
GENDER: male
BIRTH PLACE: pyke
CURRENT LOCATION: winterfell
OCCUPATION/TITLE: none
ALLEGIANCE: stark/greyjoy
FACE CLAIM: alfie allan

THE STORY

You are Ironborn.

The ways of the Ironborn are difficult to explain to those who don’t grow up in your home. Others see your people cruel and godless. You see them as hardworking people willing to take what they want. As the youngest son of Lord Balon Greyjoy, there’s salt in your veins and steel in your heart. You aspire to be like your older brothers, but your closest to your sister. From a young age you show promise with a bow and a sail. You have goals and aspirations, and are proud of who you are. 

You’re a prisoner.

Or a hostage. Or a ward. The term changes depending on who you’re speaking to but to you, they all mean the same thing.You’re only a child when your home is threatened, when your father wages war against the crown, and when your two brothers are killed. Your only a child when the Isle is sieged, defeated, and you are taken by the men who killed your brothers, pulled away from your family and the only home you’ve ever known. 

You hate Winterfell before you even get there. You hate the snow and the way that the water is all frozen over. You hate the looks of disgust you get from every person you walk past. You hate the way they tell you you’re not a prisoner, but make sure that someone is always watching you, and your weapons are kept far out of reach. You hate that people laugh when you say that your father will send a hundred ships to get you back, because you truly believe that he will. Except, the moths and years go by, and he never does. 

Its easy to hate Eddard Stark, and easier to hate his wife, who you’re certain would rather have you chained in a dungeon than walking around her home, breathing her air, and corrupting her children. But the Stark kids.. In the beginning, you want nothing more to hate them. The lot of stupid, happy children who never had to go through a war, who never get sneered at, who will one day inherit Winterfell and everything in it, including its wardships.. including you. But eventually the stupid kids wear you down. They become your friends, your brothers and sisters. You train with them, dine with them, praise their accomplishments, embarrass them when they begin showing interest in romance, and though you don’t want to admit it out loud, you’d give your life for any of them if it came down to it.

You’re not a Stark.

It comes up often. When you absentmindedly follow Robb to his seat at the table, when you make a crude joke, when you save Bran’s life. It doesn’t matter that you went thought the same schooling, the same training as your brothers- your opinion means less than theirs. The Stark children are being groomed for positions of importance; lordship, marriage, even Jon Snow has found a calling. But you remain stagnant in your wardship. You’ve have been happy to kill the direwolf puppies if Ned commanded it, because you didn’t need a six walking reminders that you weren’t one of them.

You’re not a Greyjoy.

That was what your father said to you, the first time you saw him again. You expected to be welcomed back to the Iron Isles with open arms. You had expected them to have missed you, to have been happy for your good health. Instead, you’re sneered at, told the North has made you weak and soft, unfit for the Isles, or to be called your father’s son. Balon turned down your proposal for an alliance with Robb Stark, your own idea, which might have changed the course of the entire war, and informed you that the position of his heir had been given to your sister. You could go raid a fishing village.

You’re the Lord of Winterfell.

You hadn’t had a choice. You never had before in your life, and it didn’t feel like you had one now. You would never be a Stark, but you could be a Greyjoy, if you proved yourself, paid the iron price, and took what you wanted. You wanted Winterfell. Taking your home was easy, you knew how to get in and out most efficiently, and with the majority of the army off with Robb, there was little opposition to your conquest. You tried to rule without hurting anyone, but things got out of hand. The Ironborn didn't rule without violence, and the northmen kept slighting you. If you made the wrong move, one (or both) of them would rise up against you. When it came time to kill those two boys, you were in too deep to do anything else.

You’re a prisoner… again.

This time, there are no fancy titles to mask what you are. There is no ambiguity to how you are treated. You’re hands are nailed to a cross in the dungeon, your head covered with a sack while they strip bits of skin from your chest. A man comes to save you, takes you all the way to the docks before revealing himself to be Ramsay Bolton, the horn blowing cunt who was the reason you were locked in the dungeon to begin with. You don’t understand why he felt the need to toy with you, nor do you understand what he possibility hopes to gain from keeping you around. You resist, you bargain, you back talk, but he simply cuts bits of you away until there’s almost nothing left. And then he takes the last thing you have.

You are Reek.

It rhymes with weak, it rhymes with freak, and if you don’t say it quickly enough when he asks you, you don’t get to eat. You’re only playing along at first, saying what he wants you to in order to get what you want, but soon it becomes dangerous to even think about Theon Greyjoy. And somehow, he always knows how you think. Being Theon caused you nothing but pain, while being Reek saves your life. It gets you upgraded from nudity to rags, from the dungeons to the kennels, and after the torture you had gone through, that was the equivalent of being made king.

You serve your lord obediently, even if you have to choke back a sob when you find out that Robb was killed. The thought crossed your mind, briefly, to slit his throat with the razor, but you didn’t believe that he was capable of dying. He could come back, like a cat with nine lives, and you would end up nailed to the cross… maybe it was what you deserved.

You are Theon.

Sansa reminds you of that, repeatedly. You don’t want to be Theon, you don’t want to talk about the things that Theon has done, but she’s only makes things harder on herself. You can’t save her, and trying is oney going to hurt you both. Still, something inside you snaps when Myranda raises her bow. You push Ramsay’s bitch off the balcony and run like your life depends on it, because it does.

A knight comes to save Sansa, to bring her to her brother, and you go back to the Iron Isles because you have nowhere else. Your welcome isn’t any better than last time, though this time it’s your sister berating you for being a coward in her rescue attempt, assuming you’ve comet pine for the salt throne, though nothing could be farther from what you wanted. You support her leadership this time, and sail with her to Essos to make an alliance with the Dragon Queen, Danaerys Targaryen.

You don’t have any particular feelings about her. You don’t have any particular feelings about anything pertaining to the throne, really. Lannisters, Targaryens, neither name means much to you. But you trust your sister to make the best choices for the Iron Isles, and so you follow her orders. You sit and watch her flirt with queens and drink, mostly, until you’re ambushed by Euron Greyjoy’s fleet. It’s a bloody battle and most of your men don’t survive it. Even Yara gets herself captured.

You’ve barely held a sword since Ramsay, and the last time you smelled this much burning flesh, it was your own. You can barely stand without falling over, let alone fight your uncle, one of the most renowned warriors from the isles. And if he takes you… he can’t take you. So you do the only thing you can think to do, and jump into the water. What is dead may never die.

You can be both.

You never thought that the best advice you received in your life would come from Jon Snow. You and Jon hardly even got along as children, but you respected him now. And he said that you could be both. So you saved your sister, and then headed back to Winterfell, to defend your home.

THE WRITER

NAME: nick
TIME ZONE: pacific
AGE: twenty-three
PRONOUNS: he/him
OTHER CHARACTERS: not yet

coded by ulla

[THE LORD OF LIGHT]